Modern Origins Research Articles

Glory to Dazhboh (Sun-god) or to All Native Gods?

Contemporary Ukrainian Pagans offer an alternative way of constructing a distinct national identity, based on old Slavic traditions, during times of socio-political turmoil. Despite some unifying characteristics, including nationalist views, there are many groups whose doctrines differ markedly. One of the major polemics is connected with the notions of monotheism versus polytheism as the basis for a contemporary Ukrainian spirituality. The debate between polytheism and monotheism, related to creative interpretations of the largely unknown past and dissimilar visions of the future, forms the main focus of this article. Polytheism and monotheism are often viewed as antagonistic categories. Moreover, some scholars argue against these terms, emphasizing their modern origins and strong political connotation. They are viewed as anachronistic when applied to complex and shifting spiritual practices, especially in ancient contexts. In contrast to this, Ukrainian Paganism shows that these antagonistic models can sometimes coexist, although in debate with each other, in the complex process of identity formation even within the same religious movement. While old Slavs likely did not think about themselves in these terms, their present-day Ukrainian counterparts consciously embrace “monotheism” and “polytheism” as modern political categories. In fact, these categories help Ukrainian Pagans to negotiate (among themselves) the best way to build a “pure” national identity. Monotheistic Pagans associate monotheism with the evolutionist idea of “progress” while polytheists emphasize the “authenticity” of their own worldview. Indigenized in this way, “monotheism” and “polytheism” are valid terms for describing contemporary ideologies.

UNHOLY WAR AND JUST PEACE: RELIGIOUS ALTERNATIVES TO SECULAR WARFARE

This essay argues that contemporary warfare seems to be religious but is in fact secular in nature and as such calls forth religious alternatives. The violence unleashed by Islamic terrorism and the ‘global war on terror’ is secular in this sense that it is unmediated and removes any universal ethical limits from conflicts: unrestrained violence is either a divine injunction which is blindly and fideistically believed, or it is waged in the name of the supremely sovereign state which deploys war to uphold the constitutional order guaranteeing an exclusive state monopoly on the use of arbitrary physical force. The first part compares and contrasts two false universalisms, that of global market democracy and a revivified pan-Islamic Ummah. The second part explores the classical and modern origins of Islamic terrorism. The third part examines the perverted theology at the heart of the neo-conservative ‘global war on terror’. The fourth part analyses the permanent ‘state of exception’ which underpins the modern state and licenses unrestricted violence by the sovereign who stands outside and above the constitutional order of legality and legitimacy. The fifth and final part outlines religious alternatives to secular warfare, with specific reference to Islam and Christianity.

Histories of the Present: Giovanni Arrighi & the Long Duree of Geohistorical Capitalism

One of the more telling features of the present conjuncture is the scarcity of analysis able to squarely place today’s global turbulence and the current crises in geohistorical perspective. In terms of the longue duree of capitalism since its late medieval and early modern origins right up to the present, arguably no intellectual has developed a more formidable analysis of the present crisis than Giovanni Arrighi. Arrighi of course, along with Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1989) and the late Terence Hopkins, was one of the originators and foremost proponents of the world-systems perspective on European domination, global capitalism, global income inequalities and “development” (see Arrighi, Hopkins & Wallerstein, 1989). The world-systems perspective itself – challenging as it did the dominance of post-World War II modernization theory - came out the movements of the 1960s and brought together fruitful synthesis of Marxism, Third World radicalism, and critical currents in social science, from the work of the French Annales school to that of the German historical school (see Goldfrank 2000).

Emerging Subspecialties in Neurology: Neuro-oncology

Neuro-oncology is a unique, developing neurologic subspecialty that combines many aspects of neurology with those of cancer biology. The neuro-oncologist is expert in both the diagnosis and management of primary brain tumors and neurologic complications of cancer. A career in neuro-oncology presents opportunities to utilize a multidisciplinary team approach and the application of cutting-edge technology toward patient treatment while providing compassionate patient care. Neuro-oncology can trace its modern origins to the 1970s, when the first therapeutic trials were begun. The treatment and management of primary brain tumors is now a rapidly evolving field. The World Health Organization recognizes approximately 100 different types of primary and secondary brain tumors.1,2 Glioblastoma, which is the most common and aggressive type of primary brain tumor, has an incidence of 4 to 5 cases per 100,000. For patients with glioblastoma, life expectancies are measured in months rather than years, with median survival after diagnosis of only 12 to 14 months. In the past, surgical resection and radiation therapy were the main treatment options offered to these patients. In the last several years, studies have shown that chemotherapy provides a significant clinical benefit for patients with malignant brain tumors.3 More recently, molecular markers that predict response to treatment are beginning to be identified in glioblastoma.4 Clinical trials that incorporate biologic endpoints and correlative studies are improving our understanding of the mechanisms of disease and tumor response to treatment. This greater knowledge will lead to the development of more effective agents and individualized treatments based on specific tumor profiles. In addition to glioblastoma, the neuro-oncologist manages less common tumors, including other types of glioma, germ cell tumors, meningiomas, medulloblastomas, and primary CNS lymphomas, and becomes familiar with the cancers' different biologic and molecular profiles, and treatment approaches. Despite the often poor prognosis of patients …

Edward Grant, A history of natural philosophy: from the ancient world to the nineteenth century, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. xiv, 361, £40.00, $70.00 (hardback 978-0-521-86931-7); £14.99, $24.99 (paperback 978-0-521-68957-1).

Edward Grant is one of the world's greatest authorities on medieval science. In the book under review he brings together his lifelong research on medieval science to reflect on the relation between natural philosophy and science. Grant constructs an illuminating history of natural philosophy, which he considers to be a discipline distinct from theology, mathematics and mixed mathematics. The chronological scope of the narrative reaches from around 3500 bc to the nineteenth century, but the book has a strong emphasis on the Middle Ages and the importance of this period for the Scientific Revolution. The central thesis for which the book argues is that “the most profound change in natural philosophy occurred in the seventeenth century. It involved a union of the exact sciences and natural philosophy, a phenomenon that has received relatively little attention in the vast literature about the meaning and causes of the Scientific Revolution” (p. xii). The outcome of this union, so Grant continues his argument, was that “natural philosophy, once regarded as largely independent and isolated from mathematics and the exact sciences, became significantly mathematized. In this mathematized form, natural philosophy became synonymous with the term science” (p. xii). The book derives its scope and central thesis from a disagreement between Grant and the historian Andrew Cunningham on the nature of natural philosophy. On multiple occasions, including an “open forum” discussion between Grant and Cunningham in the journal Early Science and Medicine (2000, 5 (3): 259–300), Grant had the opportunity to take issue with Cunningham's views. In the book under review he returns to these issues repeating most of his arguments against Cunningham's thesis on the nature of natural philosophy. Cunningham's view on the identity of natural philosophy is that it is about God and His creation. “For the whole point of natural philosophy was to look at nature and the world as created by God, and as thus capable of being understood as embodying God's powers and purposes and of being used to say something about them” (Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, ‘De-centring the “big picture”: The Origins of Modern Science and the modern origins of science’, Br. J. Hist. Sci., 1993, 26: 407–32, p. 421). Grant's response is to insist on the separation of natural philosophy from theology. He generalizes that “the penetration of substantive religious material into natural philosophy was minimal during the late Middle Ages. For the most part, medieval natural philosophers focused their attention on the study of natural phenomena in a rational and secular manner” (p. 261). Within the space of this review I will limit my brief comments to Grant's reaction to a second, but related aspect of Cunningham's thesis. Cunningham has insisted on the rejection of the concept of “scientific revolution” which placed, or rather misplaced, the origins of modern science in the seventeenth century. For Cunningham, natural philosophy and science, an “invention” of the nineteenth century, are two mutually exclusive endeavours. Grant's reaction is to return to the use of the concept of “scientific revolution” and to the restoration of continuity between the Middle Ages and the Scientific Revolution. However, his rejection of Cunningham's thesis depends here on the ambiguity of the term “science”. The medieval mixed mathematical disciplines were, of course, also scientiae (in their own terms), and Grant chooses to understand the term in this sense. Therefore, the central thesis of the book that the Scientific Revolution was about the fusion of the exact sciences (or mixed mathematics) and natural philosophy is for Grant an argument against Cunningham's thesis. An uncoincidental consequence of Grant's view is that endeavours such as medicine and alchemy—of which he only occasionally points out whether they were considered part of natural philosophy—are again pushed to the margins of the description of the Scientific Revolution. But perhaps this is somewhat unfair to Grant's book. With it, Grant joins the ranks of those historians (such as John Schuster and others, including Cunningham) who have pointed to the neglected importance of the category of natural philosophy for an understanding of the changes in natural knowledge practices in the seventeenth century. Although the polemical context may have introduced more ambiguities (such as that of the term “science”) than one would have wished, the book should, without hesitation, be applauded for this important contribution.

The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (review)

Reviewed by: The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England Carrie Hintz D. Bruce Hindmarsh . The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press 2005. x, 384. US $110.00 The Evangelical Conversion Narrative offers a stimulating 'biography of a genre' from its seventeenth-century origins through its decline in the nineteenth century, with emphasis on the conversion narratives of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival. Drawing on hitherto unexplored archival sources, D. Bruce Hindmarsh offers critical insight into the way that laity and clergy alike framed their spiritual lives in narrative form. The book traces the cultural changes that shaped the conversion narratives of this period, including technological and social change, [End Page 246] and the reasons why individuals turned to religious community as a means of shaping their lives. After a brief exploration of the early modern origins of the conversion narrative, Hindmarsh offers a useful exploration of the transatlantic evangelical revival in the 1730s, with an emphasis on 'how plastic religious identity had become by the mid-eighteenth century.' This chapter also argues for the social dimensions of conversion 'to stimulate parallel experience and allow the formation of a narrative community.' Much of the book is given over to a consideration of how the doctrinal, cultural, and social differences between religious groups might have shaped the kinds of narratives produced by individual believers, whether the evangelical Presbyterians of the Cambuslang revival in Scotland, moderate Calvinists within the Church of England, or Moravians. Hindmarsh's rich account covers a wide cross-section of people in the period, in large part because of his impressive work with archives and primary sources. As one example among many, he recognizes the 'special significance' of a collection of letters to Charles Wesley in the John Rylands Library, which contains 'the diverse testimony of women and men, those literate and barely literate, and persons of higher and lower ranks in society.' Hindmarsh offers powerful analysis of the interaction of self and community in the period, noting that conversion narratives were 'located at the cusp of modernity but also sharing all the assumptions of a fading Christian hegemony,' thus involving 'both creativity and discovery, both individuation and discovery.' With this expansive understanding of life narratives, it is regrettable that Hindmarsh does not draw on contemporary life-writing theorists who work on 'relational autobiography' (such as Paul John Eakins, Richard Freadman, and Nancy K. Miller), although he uses classic theorists of individualistic autobiography (such as Georges Gusdorf and James Olney) very effectively. Any scholar of the eighteenth century might productively consult this book as an alternative to secular Enlightenment models of the self. In writing the 'biography of a genre' Hindmarsh takes on a challenging task. With historical sensitivity, deep research, and engaging writing he brings to life not just the conversion narrative genre but the thousands of people who turned to it to recount their experiences. Carrie Hintz Queens College, CUNY Copyright © 2008 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Democracy as Human Rights: Freedom and Equality in the Age of Globalization

Democracy as Human Rights: Freedom and Equality in the Age of Globalization. By Michael Goodhart. New York: Routledge, 2005. 256p. 26.95 paper.Globalization, which had its modern origins in the capitalist expansion of the nineteenth century, has reached a level of development that challenges the sovereign independence, power, and authority of the nation-state, the primary actor in international politics for the last three hundred years. In so doing, it undermines popular sovereignty as traditionally understood in contemporary democracies. In his book, Michael Goodhart provides a tightly reasoned analysis of globalization's challenge to sovereignty and democratic theory, and puts forward a provocative redefinition of democracy that, he argues, can withstand globalization, even flourish in a globalized world.

A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine (review)

Reviewed by: A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine Robert B. Baker Ian Dowbiggin . A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine. Critical Issues in History. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. vii + 163 pp. $22.95 (0-7425-3110-4). This compact volume offers a comprehensive distillation of the history of euthanasia, contextualized in terms of the struggle between organized religion and secular advocacy groups. Unfortunately, when Ian Dowbiggin (an expert on American euthanasia-advocacy groups) treats subjects beyond the range of his earlier scholarship, he often introduces distortions that undermine the value of the book. Consider Dowbiggin's presentation of the origins of the modern concept of euthanasia. In 1605 Francis Bacon introduced the expression "outward Euthanasia" to designate what we would today characterize as end-of-life palliative care. Having correctly noted this point, Dowbiggin misreads a line from Bacon, interpreting the statement that seventeenth-century physicians "make a kind of scruple and religion to stay with the patient after he is given up" (p. 23) as asserting that "physicians . . . tended to stay with their patients until the bitter end" (p. 23). "To make a scruple," however, is to refrain from doing something for reasons of conscience: Bacon was asserting that seventeenth-century physicians did not treat dying patients, fearing that they would be accused of collecting fees for ineffective cures—a breach of the canons of medical propriety. Bacon wanted to change this practice, so he created a new deathbed role for the physician that would parallel the role of the priest. Priests, in Bacon's view, offered the dying person "inward Euthanasia," a good death for the soul; physicians, however, could offer "outward Euthanasia," a pain-free death for the body. Eventually physicians explored and accepted Bacon's proposed deathbed role, practicing what in the nineteenth century was called "euthanasia"—today's "palliative care." By misreading the text and asserting that physicians played this role before Bacon proposed the new practice of "outward Euthanasia," Dowbiggin misrepresents the modern origins of the subject of his book. Fortunately, Dowbiggin does a better job in tracing the late nineteenth-century transformation of the meaning of "euthanasia" from palliative care to "mercy killing." Unfortunately, however, he misrepresents other key transitions. Consider another example. On 26 August 1952, the Danish anesthesiologist Bjorn Ibsen saved a suffocating polio patient by inventing the machine that came to be known as the artificial ventilator. Quite inadvertently, Ibsen thereby initiated a debate about the propriety of disconnecting patients from ventilators, allowing them to suffocate. Fellow anesthesiologists petitioned Pope Pius XII for guidance on this subject. In 1957 Pius XII responded, declaring that patients are not obligated to undergo ventilation since these "treatments go beyond the ordinary means to which one is bound"; just as importantly, he also declared that consensual disconnection of a ventilator "is not . . . euthanasia in any way."1 Here is how Dowbiggin represents Pius XII's declaration: "For millions around the world [the pope's] [End Page 789] comments redefined euthanasia as a process whereby it was morally permissible to withhold unwanted, unnecessary treatment as long as it was clearly the patient's wish" (p. 116). This inverts the import of the pope's statement: after the proclamation, Catholics did not characterize disconnecting ventilators as "euthanasia." Thus a Catholic couple from New Jersey, Joseph and Julia Quinlan, with a clear conscience and the support of their priest, petitioned the courts for permission to disconnect the ventilator of their daughter Karen Ann (In re Quinlan, 1976); the courts, the media, and the public followed the Catholics' lead in considering this not to be a form of "euthanasia." To suggest otherwise is to distort the history of euthanasia. Ultimately, numerous small but significant errors make this book painful for the expert to peruse, and too unreliable for the public to use. It is a pity. Robert B. Baker Union College and Alden March Bioethics Institute Footnotes 1. Pius XII, "Address to an International Congress of Anesthesiologists: Official Documents Pope Pius XII," L'Osservatore Romano, 25-26 November 1957, p. 195. Copyright © 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (review)

Reviewed by: Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation Matthew Scherer Pheng Cheah. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. 408 pages. Even while its title alludes to death, Spectral Nationality delights in the life of ideas, and particularly in ideas of life. In this text, Pheng Cheah traces a constellation of concepts—including freedom, culture, organism, Bildung, artifice, nature, life, and death—with confidence and aplomb from the point at which they are given a distinctive and perdurant articulation in Kant's critical philosophy through their transposition to postcolonial theory. This drama of conceptual variation is staged in two acts: the first consists of four chapters on the development of the "organismic metaphor" in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German idealism, and the second consists of four chapters on the development of this same metaphor in twentieth-century postcolonial literatures. Each chapter bursts with nuanced erudition, but submits nonetheless rigorously to the book's thesis: contemporary theories of freedom, including popular, postcolonial nationalisms, are underwritten by a metaphor of the organic body, but while this metaphor is essential to modern theories of freedom, it is also inherently unstable and prone to perform its [End Page 1239] own unraveling. The actualization of freedom, conceived as the philosophical and political project of modernity, is, then, incapable of completion, and the nation, conceived as a body in which to incarnate the promise of freedom, remains necessarily spectral, neither simply living nor simply dead. The introduction and first chapter undertake to purge nationalism of its common associations with intolerance, fanaticism, irrationalism, violence, genocide, romantic mystification, totalitarianism, subordination, atavistic hallucination, and bourgeois ideology, as well as to foreclose appeals to faith, imagination, and the passions that might be made on its behalf (1, 6, 18, 19). Without denying the enormity of human calamity and political atrocity that has been coextensive with the past two centuries' experience of it, Cheah maintains that contemporary political thought cannot easily bypass nationalism or "replace it with utopian, liberal, or socialist cosmopolitanisms," because it is too deeply entwined within the roots of modern philosophical thought (2). Rather than becoming entangled in the web of concrete charges leveled at the concept of nationalism, the argument seeks instead to uncover its "philosophical basis" in an "organismic metaphor," which has been "subjected to the profoundest caricature and misunderstanding" (19). It is the organismic metaphor's conception of the polity as a political body that stirs reservations because it appears to sanction the violent subordination of individuals to the unchecked will of the collectivity, to invite the identification and expurgation of diseased elements for the better health of the whole, or to open yet other roads to the political horrors characteristic of the modern age. While Cheah allows that these are legitimate concerns, he argues that they are no more appropriate to the "organismic metaphor" than they are to a host of other conceptions. The "mechanistic model" that underpinned Hobbes's Leviathan—the great artificial man of springs, strings, joints, and wheels ensouled by sovereignty—Cheah claims, for instance, admits much more easily of a ferociously hierarchical and despotic employment than does the organismic metaphor (26–28). If the organismic metaphor is the philosophical basis of nationalism, what then does this metaphor comprehend? The second chapter outlines the modern origins of the polity's metaphoric conception as an organic body in Kant's critical philosophy. The argument proceeds as follows. When Kant pressed open the divide between sensible and intelligible worlds that explains the possibility of human freedom, he created a new problem of explaining the actuality of human freedom. Kant's sensible world is composed of natural phenomena bound in an unbroken, mechanical chain of efficient causality, while his intelligible world stands resolutely outside of this phenomenal world and is bound only by reason and the moral law. As the first and second Critiques make clear, the possibility of human freedom lies in one's ability to step outside of the natural causal order and to determine one's actions in accordance with the moral law. However, the absolute distinction between sensible and intelligible orders that explains...

The Compact City Fallacy

The problems of urban sprawl have long been recognized. The classic response to sprawl has been compact settlements of one form or another. Yet the profession’s modern origins stem from responses to overcrowding. Relieving crowding by letting in more light and air led to less compact urban form. This paradox remains unresolved despite recent compact city, smart growth, healthy community, and new urbanist efforts. This article reviews empirical data of whether compact cities are sustainable. Then, after reviewing current debates on sprawl and the compact city, it outlines the intellectual origins of sustainability and analyzes whether its theory supports the compact city hypothesis: compact is more sustainable than sprawl. It concludes that conceiving the city in terms of form is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve the goals ascribed to the compact city. Instead, conceiving the city in terms of process holds more promise in attaining the elusive goal of a sustainable city.

The End of Autonomy

Attention to end of life care in contemporary bioethics took its initial impetus from the New Jersey Supreme Courts Karen Quinlan decision in 1976, and from this very beginning, there has been a disconnect between theory and reality. In authorizing ventilator removal from Ms. Quinlan, who was in a persistent vegetative state, the court relied on the principle of respect for autonomous choice. It gave no weight to the wishes of Quinlan's parents or her physicians; the only person with any legally recognizable claim was Ms. Quinlan herself. But she was in no position to make any decisions about continued use of the respirator. Before the incident that left her in a persistent vegetative state, she had never expressed any wishes about how she should be cared for if she became ventilator-dependent, and afterwards she was incompetent and had no prospect of ever regaining competence. The court quickly bypassed the central problem in applying the autonomy ideal to her by positing that if she had been competent, she would have had a right to choose withdrawal, that she should not lose this right merely because she was now incompetent, and that her father could exercise this right for her, so long as he acted on the basis of what he believed to be her wishes rather than on his own view of her best interests. From its modern origins in the Quinlan case, then, the autonomy framework for conceptualizing end of life decision-making has had a distinctly artificial cast of mind. It is only thirty years after Quinlan, however, that we can now clearly see what should have been evident from the be ginning: the autonomy framework in the context of end of life decision-making simply doesn't fit the facts. This is not to deny that protecting patient autonomy in end of life care, as in all medical treatment and research, is an important principle. Nor is it to deny that disregard for patient choice has been a longstanding and unjustifiable feature of medical treatment and research. But the facts are that applying the autonomy framework in end of life decision-making has had little practical effect and much fictitious posturing. Efforts to persuade people to create and implement advance directives to protect their autonomy if they should become incompetent have essentially failed. The fictive character of these directives is revealed with special clarity in the laws of some thirty-nine states providing that where an incompetent person has not specified a health care proxy in advance, the state will make that choice itself on the premise that most people would want what the state wants for them--that is, spouse first, adult children second, and so forth. The explanation for the failure of the advance directive movement emerged with considerable force in the early 1990s, with the empirical findings of the Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatments (SUPPORT). This study tested the most extensive, rigorous effort that had ever been tried to assist terminally and critically ill patients and their families in making informed choices about end of life care. Notwithstanding the magnitude of this effort toward promoting choice, it produced no effective results. The SUPPORT data instead revealed--in findings that have been subsequently confirmed in other settings--that most patients and their families did not want to make decisions about their end of life care. Though most patients in the study were persuaded to fill out advance directives, a substantial portion of these patients and their families ignored their prior directives as death drew near. They simply did not want to talk about the reality that they were facing death; and most medical professionals returned the favor with equal reluctance to talk about dying. Two Responses There are two ways to respond to this consistently confirmed reality. One way--the dominant way for the past thirty years--has been to redouble efforts to promote patient and family choice-making. …

Augustine and Descartes: an Overlooked Chapter in the Story of Modern Origins

AbstractThis essay is intended as a corrective to contemporary accounts of the Cartesian origins of modernity and Augustine's relationship to them. The essay examines the relationship between Augustine's trinitarian theology and his doctrine of grace in order to situate his understanding of the self and the will within the context of the trinitarian beauty manifest in Christ. Then tracing the development of an alternative tradition, from the Pelagian controversy through some features of Christian asceticism, the essay contends that Descartes’res cogitans derives fundamentally not from Augustinian interiority, but from a Stoicism, derived from this tradition and from the Neo‐stoic revival of the Renaissance, which Augustine had once opposed in the name of Christ and the Trinity.

Ethics and Utopia: public health theory and practice in the sixteenth century. An essay comparing the Henrician Medical Act of 1540 and More's 1530 Ordinances, with Thomas More's novel 'Utopia' of 1516.

This essay places the early modern origins of the ethico-legal structure of medicine, in which eventually by exclusion or inclusion, dental activity shared, in the Humanist environment of the Italian Renaissance as it was imported into England in the first years of the sixteenth century. There were two linked stages to this, the first supported by the genius of Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), and the second by the administrative ability of Sir Thomas More (1478-1535). This paper concentrates on the evidence for the intellectual basis of More's medical legislation, and that which was made shortly after his death.

Approaches to cell biology teaching: learning content in context--problem-based learning.

In answering the call of the American Association for the Ad-vancement of Science (1990) that “science should be taughtas science is practiced at is best,” science faculty across thecountry have systematically begun to infuse their skills, per-spectives, and experiences as scientists into the instructionalapproaches they select for their undergraduate classrooms.Problem-based learning (PBL), which diffused into under-graduate science instruction from the medical school settingover 10 years ago, is one of those approaches. Use of PBL inthe undergraduate setting has steadily grown in popularityover the past decade (Samford University, PBL Initiative), atleastinpartbecauseitsinquiry-drivennatureandunderlyingphilosophies resonate with these comments from the recentBoyer Commission Report (1998) on undergraduate educa-tion at research universities:

The Palestinian People: A History

In a timely reminder of how the past informs the present, Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal offer an account of the history of the Palestinian people from their modern origins to the Oslo peace process and beyond. Palestinians struggled to create themselves as a people from the first revolt of the Arabs in Palestine in 1834 through the British mandate to the impact of Zionism and the founding of Israel. Their relationship with the Jewish people and the State of Israel has been fundamental in shaping that identity, and today Palestinians find themselves again at a critical juncture. In the 1990s cornerstones for peace were laid for eventual Palestinian-Israeli coexistence, including mutual acceptance, the renunciation of violence as a permanent strategy, and the establishment for the first time of Palestinian self-government. But the dawn on the 21st century saw a reversion to unmitigated hatred and mutual demonization. By mid-2002 the brutal violence of the Intifada had crippled Palestine's fledgling political institutions and threatened the fragile social cohesion painstakingly constructed after 1967. Kimmerling and Migdal unravel what went right - and what went wrong - in the Oslo peace process, and what lessons we can draw about the forces that help to shape a people. The authors present a balanced, insightful and sobering look at the realities of creating peace in the Middle East.

Lost and found: Geography personified

Geography is a discipline with a troubling history. Its modern origins lie in the European expansionism of the 18th and 19th centuries, when it developed as the science of empire. The discipline still treads an uneasy path between scientific endeavour and derring-do, but this wasn't and still isn't the only trouble with geography; it is simply spread too thinly across a huge diversity of sub-disciplines. Nevertheless, a distinct coalescence of events occurred in the 19th century, notably in the founding of geographical societies and the European exploration of Africa, which resulted in the emergence of an almost united geographical endeavour.

Psychodynamics and intersubjectivity in management organisations

The modern origins of organisation theory probably date from the work of Taylor and Weber at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was Freud, however, who elaborated how early identification processes influence the form of adult association, and this was elucidated further by Klein's concepts of developmental positions and projective identification. Expanding Kleinian theory, Bion was probably the first to develop a comprehensive psychoanalytic view of group and organisational behaviour. This paper describes briefly the contributions of Klein and Bion to organisation theory and, with the use of a vignette, illustrates how their approach might describe a typical management situation. A further company case study is presented in which this approach is used to elucidate the organisational dynamics that were experienced by the author/consultant. An alternative account is also given using an existential phenomenological perspective, making tentative links between the concepts of projective identification and intersubjectivity. The paper concludes that managers and consultants must understand the psychodynamic or existential nature of anxiety and its influence on interpersonal relations if they are to effect real organisational change.

Biographies and Other Essays on the History of Clinical Chemistry. Louis Rosenfeld, editor. Washington, DC: AACC Press, History Division, 1999, 381 pp., $12.00. ISBN 1-890883-21-2.

This book, published by the History Division of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, contains 79 articles from Clinical Chemistry that reflect the wide-ranging interests of their authors. The monograph was dedicated to Elizabeth K. Smith, PhD, a charter member of the History Division’s executive committee and grantor of the bequest that made this publication possible. The articles are arranged in five categories, each in the order of publication. Thirty-four of the selections are biographies, 12 are reviews of developments in the discipline, and 18 concern the modern origins of clinical chemistry. Laboratory-related activities are discussed in 11 of the articles, and the histories of commercial and industrial contributions …

Teaching in America: the slow revolution

Two professions assessing America's teachers and schools the essential acts of teaching three questions every teacher must answer the modern origins of the profession - Florence'story, 1890-1920 reforming teaching in the midst of social crisis -Andrena's story, 1960-1990 teachers' struggle to take charge of their practice - the Rochester story, 1987-1997 the progress of the slow revolution throughout the nation teaching in 2020 research methods.

:Origins of Legislative Sovereignty and the Legislative State: Volume 5, Modern Origins, Developments, and Perspectives against the Background of "Machiavellism." Book II: Modern Major "Isms" (17th-18th Centuries)

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